Hypocritical Google Lashes Out at Apple and Microsoft

On the one hand, the tech industry is awash in patent trolls, companies that own generally spurious patents for technologies they didn't really invent, which exist solely to sue other companies into licensing said technologies. On the other, we have tech companies that have patents for technologies that they did, in fact, invent (or at least purchase legitimately) and, as important, use in actual products. These companies, too, must sue others to protect their patents, but for far more legitimate reasons.

Google is upset about the latter kind of company, and it's citing two heavy-hitters, Apple and Microsoft, as example of companies that own patents and are using the legal system to prevent other companies from infringing on their protected technologies. More specifically, these companies are using their patents in a war against Google's Android OS, which is of course the dominant market leader. In poor Google's world, these companies are out for no good.

But what's the argument here, exactly?

According to a blog post that voices this complaint, and I'm using its exact wording here, "Android is on fire. More than 550,000 Android devices are activated every day, through a network of 39 manufacturers and 231 carriers."

Oh. Great. So there's no cause for alarm, right? I mean, Android is already running roughshod over the rest of the mobile world, including industry darling Apple's iPhone. Right?

Wrong.

"Android's success has yielded ... a hostile, organized campaign against Android by Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and other companies, waged through bogus patents," Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond writes in the post.

Ah, bogus patents. I'm curious how that was determined. Let's read on. Surely, this will be explained. After all, it's an incredible charge to make publicly. There must be proof and some public explanation of why that word was used.

"They're doing this by banding together to acquire Novell's old patents and Nortel's old patents (the 'Rockstar' group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn't get them; seeking $15 licensing fees for every Android device; attempting to make it more expensive for phone manufacturers to license Android (which we provide free of charge) than Windows Phone 7; and even suing Barnes & Noble, HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. Patents were meant to encourage innovation, but lately they are being used as a weapon to stop it."

Actually, using patents in this way is a legitimate business endeavor with no proof of "bogusness." But I am curious, if Google had in fact won these patents for itself, would that have made them "non-bogus"?

I'm sure he'll explain the bogus comment. Let's keep reading.

"A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a 'tax' for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation. This anti-competitive strategy is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they’re really worth."

Again, no explanation of the bogus claim is made, though he does repeat the charge ("largely questionable patent claims"), place the word tax in quotes, suggesting that these companies use this term themselves, and then add a more general "anti-competitive" charge. The thing is, this activity is the very notion of competitiveness. Patents are designed to protect intellectual property, which are a competitive advantage. In many ways, Apple, Microsoft, and whoever else owns these patents actually protecting them is what makes this activity competitive. Google can't just use protected technologies owned by other companies without paying for them. That is competition.

"The winning $4.5 billion for Nortel’s patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1 billion. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means — which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop."

Laws do not "frown" on anything; something is either legal or illegal. And again the charge of "bogusness" is raised ... without any explanation of why they might in fact be illegitimate. And then there's some lovely speculation about regulatory scrutiny and what the resulting action might be.

But let's say Apple and Microsoft overpayed for the patents in order to attack Google. Let's say this is in fact anti-competitive behavior. How does that makes the patents bogus? It doesn't.

"We're determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it."

Wait for it, this is going to be good.

"We're looking intensely at a number of ways to do that ... We're looking at other ways to reduce the anti-competitive threats against Android by strengthening our own patent portfolio. Unless we act, consumers could face rising costs for Android devices — and fewer choices for their next phone."

So let's recap.

Google believes that Microsoft's and Apple's purchases of patents are anticompetitive, and that the mobile patents they own are bogus. To combat this, Google is going to acquire its own (bogus?) patents.

And I'd also point out that Google licenses Android for free. So by raising the price of Android by imposing licensing fees on technologies Android is in fact using, Apple, Microsoft, and others are arguably simply leveling the playing field and taking away an artificial Android advantage, forcing the OS to compete more fairly. Arguably, by "dumping" Android in the market at no cost, Google--which has unlimited cash and can afford to do such a thing--is behaving in an anticompetitive fashion. In fact, one could argue that Google is using its dominance in search advertising to unfairly gain entry into another market by giving that new product, Android, away for free. Does this remind you of any famous antitrust case?

And where's the harm to Google here? How can Google, which commands almost double the market share of the next closest competitor in this market and is, in fact, seeing nothing but continued growth, argue that its competitors are acting anti-competitively? (The numbers: Apple activated a bit less than 30 million iOS-based devices--iPhones and iPads--in the past quarter. According to the Google figure cited above, it is activating almost 50 million Android-based devices in the same time period.)

And speaking of harm, isn't Google's Android dumping harming competition? After all, the mobile OS makers it is competing against developed and paid for the technologies they use, and it's reasonable for them to recoup those costs through the sale of their systems. Why is it OK for Google to steal their ideas and then give the resulting product away?

There's no David in this story of Goliaths. But give me a break. Google has simply cast a light on its own dark secrets. It is Google, not Apple and Microsoft, that is behaving badly here.

Discuss this Article 14

The purpose of patents is to spur innovation, not competition. Patents protect innovators from unscrupulous competitors.
What reason is there to invest large sums into inventing something new if your competitor is free to copy the new invention, thereby avoiding the cost of innovating?
The simple fact is that without patent protections, copycats like Google, Samsung, HTC, and Motorola would be free to do what they have been trying to do, namely gain an unfair competitive advantage by blatantly copying Apple's novel inventions. Back in school they called it cheating.
With regards to Apple's multi-touch patents, Microsoft's hands aren't clean either. However, Microsoft has many valid patents of their own with which to counter any claims by Apple. This bothers me, since much of Windows Phone 7 copies the iPhone, but if Microsoft is within the law, so be it. At least Microsoft has made an attempt to create their own visual style in the mobile OS space. I guess that's something...

Microsoft is using some ideas that Apple has invented, and from what I've read Microsoft is paying for the rights to use those patented ideas. Likewise, there are some patents that stemmed from the Windows Mobile era of smartphones that Apple also licenses. Despite being competitors, Apple and Microsoft are paying each other to use their collective ideas to produce two sets of products. Google is taking these same ideas and integrating them into their own product, but not paying anyone for their use. That's the problem. Microsoft did wrong a decade ago and paid the price. They are playing by the rules now. Google is doing what Microsoft did 12 years ago, except until now, no one wanted to believe Google was in the wrong.

The patents MS and AAPL acquired are mostly bogus because most patents are bogus -- it's in the nature of a "vanity press" patent system, where both the patenters and their lawyers have a large financial incentive to patent things that are obvious or have previously been patented.
It's also correct that overall the patent system is a giant tax on innovation. The 4.5B that MS and AAPL spent on the Nortel patents was just a tax. They didn't look at those patents in order to help them invent anything, it was just an extra cost added after the fact. Every complicated software program violates hundreds or thousands of patents, because all the obvious ways of doing anything have been patented. Every small software startup is imperiled because what they've created is not legally theirs.

Microsoft and Apple cross-licensed their technology years ago. They made peace when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and asked for Bill Gates' help to keep Apple alive.
Google is the evil one here. It steals other's ideas rather than innovating on its own. Patents are legal protection for one's inventions. Google stole from Apple, Oracle, Sun, Microsoft, and many others.
The reason that Google has so few patents of its own is that it hardly invents nor innovates. Creativity is not in its genes. Google steals for a living.

Google should have thought about buying those patents when they had the chance. Microsoft and Apple want to collectively use them as a protectionary measure.
There should be a distinction between making a patent for protecting your own idea and using another patent as a means to own the rights to an idea (whether for distribution or investment), which is clearly what this buyout is meant for.
When someone purchases a patent, it should be made clear that they are not the original patent holder. IMO, patents should be owned by individuals only. Organizations should be registered as licensees only. Last time I checked, planetary bodies weren't named after companies. Instead they are named after the original discoverer. Ideas, and thus, patents, should be treated the same way - as a discovery. This would solve a LOT of the patent issues that we have today.

If Android is anticompetitive, then Bing most certainly is. Microsoft entered online search and advertising for the sole purpose of using its OS monopoly and buckets of cash to deprive others (specifically Google) of revenue. Proof? Losing more than $8Billion over the past 6 years isn't "trying to get a foot-hold". It's dumping. It's bundling. It's taking a dump in the pool so that nobody can swim there anymore.

Google 'searches' for a living. They are an information location service. That's what they specialize in -- jameskatt calls that stealing?
Google didn't jump in with a software cartel because it wants to be able to give things away via open source -- something MS and the others have tried to do great harm to -- in fact MS won't even allow open source apps to be given away or vended on their version of an app store -- they preclude anyone running open source apps on a MSphone.
The cartel is about control and closed policies. Google may become that way -- they certainly would have been contractually bound to be that way if they signed on with the cartel.
You people need to wake up.
Google isn't forcing 'android' phones on everyone who uses google to search/ email, etc.
Using incredibly FLAWED logic to compare them to the MS trust case where IE was bundled and presented to the user on every first impression of Windows, is completely LAME.
MS and the others have always called open source and 'free' products 'anti-competitive.'.... Awwww....shucks...guess we should all stop thinking our own thoughts which are 'free', and only use MS-thought? 'Free' is the natural state of things. Requiring fixed compensation where the vendor sets a fixed price is a relatively new convention. That MS and other monopolies dictate prices for poor quality products leaving consumers little recourse except to go with open source (and lose all mainstream product support), is hardly a "fair" alternative.
I don't trust google -- I limit the information they try to collect on me by not using all of their services (among other methods) -- yet they can still track me to my bedroom -- however! MS, is also in my BR, living room, etc. and forces incompatible upgrades down my wire all the time -- only choice is to disconnect from internet, since they have so many bugs they need to patch, I have to receive updates.
This article and many responses seem poorly thought out.

Though I'm not the biggest Paul Thurrott fan, I have to admit, he nailed it with his recap portion of this post which explains how Google's free distribution "dumping" of Android on the market is actually anti-competitive. Well done!

I would argue that Google's giving away of Android is actually helping competition. After all, their competitors can use Android, free of costs and royalties, for implementation in their own products. They can also add features to Android, expanding it, and increasing its value to customers, and freely share those with others, including Google. Stifling competition? Not necessarily.

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